⚠⚠ Is the tzimtzum literal? — the quarrel this app is standing in

Luria says the Infinite withdrew from a point to make room for a world. The question that split eighteenth-century Jewry is whether that withdrawal is k'pshuto — literal — or not.

The Hasidic reading: not literal. The withdrawal is a concealment, a veiling of the light from the perspective of the creature. From God's side nothing was ever vacated and nothing is other than God.

The Vilna Gaon's circle: the tzimtzum is real. Something was genuinely withdrawn, and therefore there is genuinely a place where God is not immanent in the way He is above — which is what keeps holy and profane, permitted and forbidden, from collapsing into one another.

⭐⭐⭐ Everything else in the herem follows from this. If the concealment is only apparent then the sparks really are in the tavern and the strange thought, worship really can be corporeal, and the boundary the mitnagdim were defending is a pedagogical convenience. If the withdrawal is real, all of that is a category error with a mystical vocabulary.

⚠⚠ AND THIS APP HAS BEEN RENDERING ONE SIDE OF IT EVERY FRAME WITHOUT SAYING SO. ⊙ the tehiru, the first of the four shader layers, draws a vacated space with a residue still in it — the chalal and the reshimu — which is a picture of a withdrawal that really happened and left a trace. That is closer to the literal reading than to the Hasidic one. The app is named for the vacated space. It should say which side of the argument its own name is on.